Friday, September 29, 2023

Five top novels about war

Audrey Gale long dreamed of being a writer, but never anticipated the circuitous road she’d take to get there. After twenty-plus years in the banking industry, she grew tired of corporate gamesmanship and pursued her master’s in fiction writing at the University of Southern California. Her first novel, a legal thriller entitled The Sausage Maker’s Daughters, was published under the name A.G.S. Johnson. Her second, The Human Trial, is the first book in a medical-thriller trilogy inspired by Gale’s own experiences with the gap between traditional medicine and approaches based on the findings of the great physicists of the 20th Century, like Einstein and Bohr.

At CrimeReads Gale tagged "five novels centered around war, mostly the Second World War, that focus on the crimes of the millions, both victims and perpetrators/accessories, into the small personal stories of individuals caught in the rip currents." One title on the list:
All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

A slice of WWII told through two youngsters on opposite sides of the war—one a blind girl in Brittany, France, the other a young male orphan with an intuitive comprehension of the new radio technology that informs the conflict. The two connect through those invisible radio waves that represent the ephemeral cord between two young people caught by circumstances neither understands nor controls. In both its innocence and scientific possibility, the story is poignantly beautiful.
Read about another entry on the list.

All the Light We Cannot See is among Jyoti Patel's top ten books about family secrets, Kimi Cunningham Grant's top six books featuring father-daughter relationships, Liz Boulter's top ten novels about France, Emily Temple's fifty best contemporary novels over 500 pages, Jason Allen's seven top books with family secrets, Whitney Scharer's top ten books about Paris, David Baldacci's six favorite books with an element of mystery, Jason Flemyng's six best books, Sandra Howard's six best books, Caitlin Kleinschmidt's twelve moving novels of the Second World War and Maureen Corrigan's 12 favorite books of 2014.

--Marshal Zeringue